Cloning Work Areas for Testing and Production
Oracle LSH supports cloning Work Areas so that you can make an exact copy of a Work Area and all the objects it contains and install it to a new Oracle LSH Schema to create a test or production data environment.
When you first create an object of any kind, including a Work Area, its validation status is set to Development. Your company should develop standards for promoting objects to the validation status Quality Control, and from Quality Control to Production. Oracle LSH enforces rules concerning the interaction of the validation statuses of a Work Area and each of its objects, and the value of the Work Area's Usage Intent attribute, to support the validation process.
Tools
Oracle LSH uses the following tools to support validation and separate environments for testing and production:
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Usage Intent Attribute. Work Areas have attribute called Usage Intent with the possible values Development, Quality Control, and Production.
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Cloning. Work Areas have an operation called cloning that creates an exact duplicate of the Work Area and all its object instances.
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Validation Status. All object definitions and instances, including Work Areas, have a validation status with the possible values Development, Quality Control, Production, and Retired.
When all the object instances in a Work Area, and the object definitions on which they are based, reach a higher validation status than the Work Area's Usage Intent, a user with the necessary privileges can clone the Work Area and set the new Work Area's Usage Intent attribute to the next higher value. See Figure 11-1.
Rules
Oracle LSH enforces the following rules:
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To be installed in a Work Area, object instances must have a validation status equal to or greater than the Usage Intent of the Work Area.
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A Work Area cannot be promoted to a validation status higher than the validation status of any of its object instances.
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No executables can be run in a Work Area until the Work Area's validation status is equal to or greater than its Usage Intent value, except by users with the special Install Qualify Submit privilege on the Work Area. This is to allow testing of a Work Area before making it available to the full set of users with security access to it.
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Full installation is not allowed in Work Areas with a Usage Intent of Production. This is to protect production data from deletion.